the infrastructure of fun

America from the eyes of an 11-yr old visitor, and what I still believe

The summer I turned eleven, 35 years ago, I flew to the United States with my grandparents and my sister. We boarded a Pan Am 747 from Karachi.

My grandfather was going through a grooming and sartorial phase at the time, but remained Westernized in many other respects. So despite sporting a ten-inch long white beard, kurta, and improvised Nehru cap, he sat in the smoking section, joking and playing cards with strangers who, by mid-flight, felt like old friends. Nobody knew each other, but everyone knew how to play. That, I would later realize, was a kind of American social contract: participation without prequalification.

We started in New York. The Statue of Liberty stood serene in the harbor. Times Square: blinking, enormous, unapologetically loud. Strawberries and cream at the Met. I ate my first Big Mac on a park bench overlooking the East River, the wrapper crinkling as my grandmother wiped ketchup off my chin.

In Washington DC, we visited not only the museums and the monuments but also the White House. I didn’t know it was possible for just about anyone to be a mere two rooms away from a President, but there we were.

In suburban Chicago, we stayed with family. My cousins taught me Mike Tyson’s Punch-Out!! on Nintendo. We spent long afternoons at the neighborhood pool. Two older boys—neighborhood bullies—liked to dunk my head underwater, again and again. I learned to hold my breath for over a minute. I didn’t tell anyone. It felt like a test.

Everything was bigger. Brighter. Vending machines offered Coke and Gobstoppers with mechanical ease. There were entire stores just for toys. Roller coaster parks so large they required printed maps. Breakfast cereal turned milk pink. Pop-Tarts, Fruit Roll-Ups, whole milk so cold and sweet it tasted like dessert. Every pleasure felt accessible, engineered to delight on arrival.

A family friend gave me a twenty-dollar bill. It took three visits to Toys “R” Us before I could decide what to buy. The problem wasn’t scarcity. It was abundance: too much to want, too much to choose.

That’s what stuck with me more than the museums or monuments: the fact that delight wasn’t rationed. It came sealed in plastic, priced for pocket money, dispensed without question. No one asked why we were there. I didn’t feel like a visitor. It seemed easy to belong.

I didn’t yet understand the systems that made that possible. The invisible scaffolding of economic systems, governance, and trust. But I felt it. A kind of ambient permission.

I didn’t have the words for any of it. But I knew this much:

I had to come back.

Libertarian Utopia or Government Abdication?

When we returned to Karachi, the contrast landed hard.

When the power went out, generators began coughing to life across the neighborhood like a chain reaction of disgust.

We filled our home’s water tank when the city lines offered pressure, but mostly relied on something my father called a “donkey pump”. Each time it sputtered to life, it let out what sounded like a wet fart. Eventually, the pump became useless at sucking out water from the main line, and we began paying for water tankers.

The streets flooded during monsoon season every year because the city had never gotten around to installing drainage infrastructure. Nearly 5,000 years ago, the Indus Valley Civilization that existed in the same general area had better urban planning, drainage, and sanitation.

We triple-locked our doors at night. The neighborhood pooled together to hire private night watchmen who would periodically strike the electricity poles with a club, so that we—their employers—knew they were awake and on the job.

Even middle class families like ours attended private schools, saw private doctors, arranged private security and private transportation. Our lives orbited around personal workarounds.

The useful parts of the state hadn’t collapsed. They’d evaporated. Simply faded away. I was growing up in a place where the government had largely exited the business of serving its people. And no one expected otherwise. It wasn’t just corruption. It was absence.

Growing up in this environment taught me early that improvisation is not autonomy. That the appearance of independence: having to arrange your own water, power, education, healthcare, security—because the state has given up—that this is not freedom.

So when I think back to that summer in America—the clean streets, the museums, the snack machines—it’s not just the fun. It’s the sense that someone, or a system, was actually responsible for managing the freedom. That the delight that I experienced didn’t need to be negotiated day to day.

Many Americans may not notice that kind of thing.

I notice it because I know a world without it.

Order Without Voice

I kept my promise to my 11-yr old self and returned to the U.S. a few years later, to attend college. In my late twenties, after college and some time working in New York and Washington, DC, I moved to China for an adventure. What began as a one-year experiment became a decade. I stayed long enough to build a company, raise two children, and manage a global team.

Shanghai ran like a machine. Streets were swept before dawn. New subway lines opened each year. Bullet trains made American infrastructure feel like a museum exhibit. I could walk alone down a dark alley at 2 a.m., wearing a very nice watch, and never look over my shoulder.

Each generation seemed to be doing better than the one before. The people were driven. They believed in progress and were building it with steel and sweat. It mostly worked.

Increasingly, there was freedom from want. There was freedom from a kind of day to day fear about personal safety. But there was not freedom in the American sense.

You couldn’t protest. You couldn’t publish freely. You couldn’t choose your leaders. People knew the rules of silence the way you know how to lower your voice when someone’s sleeping.

Later, I moved to Singapore. Different setting, same quiet bargain. The city was spotless and crime was rare, taxes were low. Life was well-lit and predictable. A benevolent algorithm governed daily life. Housing, healthcare, education was allocated with stunning efficiency. In exchange: compliance.

I understand the seductive tradeoff, especially for those who have lived through chaos. Leaders who planned thirty years ahead instead of three years behind. Competence is a balm.

But the limits are also apparent.

I had never voted as an adult. Not once. Not in the US, China, or Singapore. But I wanted to, one day. To belong to a place where my voice was accepted, and mattered.

I missed the friction. The arguments, the sparks. The sense that disagreement wasn’t just tolerated, but necessary. I knew from studying The Federalist Papers and the anti-federalist essays as an undergraduate, that out of strong disagreement and diverging perspectives on fundamental issues, what emerges is stronger, more creative, and more durable.

So once again, I found myself looking towards America. Not for its polish, but for its permission. It doesn’t always get it right, but there is space for people to try. To belong not just as residents, but as participants.

Freedom vs. Chaos

In America, freedom is everywhere.

It’s printed on T-shirts and bumper stickers. It’s invoked in campaign speeches. And today, on July 4th, it’s lit up across the night sky. I hope to be at the National Mall this evening, watching the fireworks rise over Washington, DC.

I recently enjoyed the freedom to shoot an AR-15 at a gun range in Texas. It was after an hour of safety training, under the supervision of an instructor and a friend who served in the military. We followed the rules, double-checked each magazine, handled the weapon with care. It felt safe. Controlled. Almost bureaucratic.

It also felt surreal.

Because it’s the same weapon that many seventeen-year-olds can legally own in many states, and in thousands of households right now, it may be lying amongst the mundane clutter of a high schooler’s bedroom. No training, licensure or supervision needed. The same weapon that’s been used to walk into a school and alter the fate of a town.

I grew up desensitized to the presence of guns. In Karachi, rifles were slung casually over shoulders in public. But I never thought of that as freedom. People carried guns because they didn’t trust the system to protect them, or because they saw an opportunity to impose themselves on others.

I worry when the rhetoric of liberty is used to sell a reality of fend-for-yourself.

You see it in more than just gun laws. You see it in a healthcare system where illness can mean bankruptcy. In public schools where quality is far too variable by zip code. In the casual slide toward letting personal beliefs shape public rules.

Freedom to choose, but only if you can afford the menu, is an incomplete freedom.

Yet, America offers something rare: a kind of structured chaos that invites experimentation. Room to build, fail, try again. A system that lets you challenge it without disappearing. A culture that tolerates irreverence, reinvention, even rebellion.

But the balance is fragile. And the line between freedom and anarchy is thinner than most people realize. When the state retreats too far, freedom becomes a private good, bought and hoarded by those who can afford insulation from risk. Everyone else is left improvising, depending on the wet fart of a donkey pump for life’s necessities.

When enough people feel abandoned to self-reliance, improvising on the basics of life, they stop believing the system offers true freedom.

And then the whole thing starts to feel fragile.

A Love Letter

I’ve come to America three times.

First as a wide-eyed kid with $20 in my pocket and sugar on my tongue. Then as a student who stayed to work, to grow up, to learn how the country actually worked. And finally, with my own family, to start again, to close the loop I began the summer I turned eleven.

Each version of me found something different. The first time: joy. The second: possibility. The third: perspective.

I’ve watched my daughters run through sprinklers in backyards that looked like the ones I once ran through. I’ve taken them on road trips where the gas station snack aisle is the destination. And these days, my wife and I are teaching them to drive on quiet suburban streets, under skies that don’t flicker with power cuts.

I’ve also lived through the absence of government. I’ve lived under its overreach. I’ve seen competence without liberty, and liberty without competence.

America is neither extreme. It’s a fragile middle. Messy, sometimes maddening, but remarkably alive.

America doesn’t offer perfection. It offers space. Space to build. To dissent. To reinvent. To get it wrong and try again. That kind of freedom isn’t ambient. It’s constructed, and needs to be protected.

Sometimes, that scaffolding wobbles if the balance shifts. Perhaps we’re in the wobbly part now.

I worry that those who haven’t seen what I have, mistake freedom for the absence of interference.

To me:

Freedom is the presence of a framework that makes meaningful choice possible.

I believe in the idea of America. Out of memory. Out of gratitude. Because I’ve seen the alternatives up close.

Belief alone can’t hold the scaffolding up. But without it, nothing holds.

Somehow, after all these years, America still tastes like cold milk and pop-tarts.

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Adil Husain is a strategist, founder, and observer of global complexity. He has spent over two decades advising Fortune 1000 firms on market intelligence and international growth, with long stints living and working in the U.S. and China and shorter stints in other places. He is the Managing Director of Emerging Strategy, a strategic intelligence firm that helps enterprises navigate volatile markets, and the publisher of a rapidly growing B2B media platform with ~200,000 subscribers in its first 90 days.

On The Husain Signal, he writes about business, borders, belief systems, and the things we’re taught to feel but not always to say.

You can contact Adil here, or connect with him on LinkedIn.

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